Whereas the catalog is still incredibly well updated and useful, kvasir is primarily used to find businesses and other resources on the net, as it will only find resources in Norway (or, if you choose, the nordic countries). Only quite recently (mid-2001) it started to offer freetext search of the web globally. The usefulnes of Kvasir was mainly that of being a good search engine for the nordic countries, because neither Altavista nor Hotbot (the two largest search engines back in the day) had a good Norway/nordic countries coverage. Things have changed, however, and imho, Kvasir is finished. Mind you - it is still useful for finding resources exclusive to Norway, but I find myself using Google 99% of the time, because it is significantly faster, and more up to date.